filmmaking

Episode 8 - Long Takes feat. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn

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Episode 8 - Long Takes feat. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn

We’re excited to host filmmakers Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn, who join us for a discussion about long takes - shots that last for an extended period of time without cutting - and, in particular, their groundbreaking use of an 90-minute long take in their 2019 feature film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open. Shot entirely on 16mm film, Hepburn and Tailfeathers collaborated with cinematographer Norm Li to overcome the format’s limitations to achieve this aesthetic feat.

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Episode 7 - The Hunger Games and Cinemascope

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Episode 7 - The Hunger Games and Cinemascope

Today we jumped into one of our favourite topics — the overuse of super a super-wide frame, i.e. cinemascope, in contemporary movies. The Hunger Games is our unfortunate case study today, but the conversation touches on everything from the ratio’s rise to multiplex dominance to whatever the heck Michael Bay is doing with aspect ratios in his Transformers movies. Seriously, what is going on there.

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Episode 4 - Self-Reflexivity and Perfect Blue feat. Paige Smith

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Episode 4 - Self-Reflexivity and Perfect Blue feat. Paige Smith

Filmmaker Paige Smith joins us to talk about the animated psychological horror film Perfect Blue and the copious use of self-reflexivity — when a work openly acknowledges itself, forcing the viewer to recognize the trappings and mechanics of the movie they’re watching.

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Episode 3 - Worldizing and American Graffiti

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Episode 3 - Worldizing and American Graffiti

Walter Murch’s revolutionary sound design technique worldizing aesthetically defines George Lucas’s 1973 film American Graffiti. Worldizing tries to emulate how a sound would be heard in the particular location of each scene. In this episode of Film Formally, Devan and Will discuss the technique and how Murch uses it to emphasize the narrative needs of American Graffiti.

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Episode 2 - Small Crews feat. Sophy Romvari

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Episode 2 - Small Crews feat. Sophy Romvari

In this episode of Film Formally, we chat with Toronto-based filmmaker (and one of our favourite collaborators) Sophy Romvari about why she scales down her films’ budgets, crew sizes, and production length. Together, we talk critically about the widespread perception that a film’s quality is defined by its “production value”, the complexity of its shoot, and the pain endured in making it.

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Episode 1 - Contagion and Digital Cinematography

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Episode 1 - Contagion and Digital Cinematography

In this episode, Devan and Will discuss Steven Soderbergh’s pioneering use of digital image capture in his remarkable run of films that followed his transition away from celluloid-based filmmaking starting with Che in 2008. Focusing on his 2011 epidemic thriller Contagion, we cover his usage of the medium’s perceived ‘drawbacks’ for artistic purposes as well as wider myths and trends in modern digital cinematography, including film emulation.

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